In spite of the fact that people everywhere possess
the same wiring, significant differences in perception can generate opposite
conclusions. Conflicting adaptions follow. I will take for example the
perception of wealth--another context for developing cognitive dissonance. Before
the invention of money, wealth was something real--a resource. It took the
invention of "property' to limit access to wealth by anyone with the ability to
use it. Money became the universal means of trading labor or property. In the
games of monopoly that followed, fewer and fewer people owned resources. Money
became all-important, a new religion. God is what we believe we must obey to
survive and nearly everyone survives on money. The belief that money is wealth
leads to strategies that destroy resources, real wealth. Capitalism is the
business of turning real wealth into paper wealth. The more petroleum Shell
pumps, the more money it makes. Price only reflects market fluctuations. No
incentives for conservation exist under present means of accounting. Resources
such as oil must be owned by the pubic.
A great many other unfortunate adaptations follow from
the deification of money. Both deductive and inductive reasoning can make a
shambles out of logic where no first principles are applied. If money is God's
currency, those who possess it are God's children. It is the measure of who is
holy and who is profane and the value of all things. The application of natural selection is
perverted by the conclusion that those without money failed to pass the fitness
test. Natural selection has nothing to do with possessions outside of resources.
Money has no intrinsic value and inter-tribal competition for it does not
determine fitness to survive in the natural environment. Nor does it provide a
measure for merit in the division of labor that gives groups an advantage. The
ability to wrest money from the earth and other people has no correlation to
survival skills outside of the money game. It teaches no lessons that one can
apply to survival in the world we depend upon for support.
Those who deify money consider government programs
that support those not able to generate enough money as meddling in God's
scheme, encouraging the lazy, and punishing, through taxes, the righteous. A
Darwinian struggle for money determines who are the fittest. The diversity
natural selection favors and the strength of the whole that health care and
education provide are not as important as maintaining the privileges of big
money. Making it big as the only reason for living--the prime motivator that
justifies the war of all-against-all--defines the America pathology. That morality
will never measure up to what natural selection requires for survival.
The reformation of such dissonant views will require
the dissemination of scientific research at the street level. For example, the
religious prohibition of sex for any other purpose than procreation was based
on the assumption that sex served no other purpose. Viewed from the vantage
point of natural selection, that is not so. Women need help in raising children
and sex helps to keep a man at home. With the additional prohibition against
contraceptives, the choice is too many children or too little sex. Both have
created considerable dissonance.
In another context, economic market theory is
justified in part by the assumption that people make their purchases on
rationally based self-interest. Research has long since discovered that people
buy for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with efficient
consumption. The market makes a great many mistakes in the allocation of
resources and in inequitable distribution. A good deal of regulation is required
to stop fraud and waste.
The search for the foundation of morality has created
yet other dichotomies. Are human beings basically cooperative and therefore the
best government is one that protects people from the environments that degrade
and warp and breed ignorance? Are humans basically selfish so that good
government requires the restraints of exacting codes and stringent authority?
Do people respond to help or must they be left on their own to sink or swim?
Are we genetically wired or are we blank slates crafted by education?
Depending on how they are applied, these opposing views
are not mutually exclusive. Since the introduction of biological, social, and
cognitive research based on natural selection, the answers to these questions
have become yes and no. Survival is paramount but cooperation provides the
strongest way of doing it. The genes define our limits and the physical and
social environment determines which genes will apply or get changed. Belief
systems govern behavior, often in the face of reality. Good and evil remain
powerful metaphors engulfed in cognitive dissonance because, absent first
principles, the definitions of good and evil become the handmaidens of agendas.
Moral codes (including legislation) may support an
agenda that has little or nothing to do with the welfare of the species. In a
world growing smaller and smaller in the context of population growth and
technology, only survival of the species as a first principle provides a basis
for joining the tribes--an all-inclusive morality. That can only be accomplished
on the basis of fact. Neither God nor nature has any favorites. Like all
animals, we have to take nature as it is. Its adaptations to our technology
create things like global warming.
The dual approach to cognition may enlighten or
confuse. The overlapping social relationships between individuals and groups
create conflicts of interest. Technology may serve practical ends while
ignoring negative impacts on people and resources. The most dramatic agenda in
human affairs evolved from what I reference in my book as the outlaw gene. Metaphorically,
the selfish gene strives for survival. The cooperative gene seeks the most
efficient way of doing it. The outlaw gene perverts cooperation to justify an elite's
exploitation of other people's labor. Creating sanctions for an elite to exercise
brute force as in slavery can do it or it can be done by socially sanctioned deception
as in class stigmatization.
Modern history evolved out of the struggle to end forms
of divine rights. America started with slavery as a legal property right. We are
still fighting the Civil War. Formal slavery ended but the impetus to gain the right
to exploit others continues in various guises. White supremacy has merely taken
a new face. Money has replaced kings. Inadequate wages, price gouging, and
inequality support what I reference as relative slavery sanctioned by
"markets.'
What are the first principles that will help us
perceive the world more clearly and improve the chances of consensus? To begin
with, we must take natural selection as the context of all human understanding.
It is our history, the necessary context for research, and the basis for
determining what may succeed. In that context, survival of the species provides
the basis for judging the ethical use a given technology or social norm.
Judgments based on on-the-ground results, not dogma
or philosophy, improve the ability to integrate inductive and deductive
reasoning. Applying the same standard to everyone will also improve the chances
of consensus.
Finally, the genius of the American Constitution
should be recognized in a larger context. The strategy of dividing power
between three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) and
other divisions of power prevented the rise of totalitarian agendas. The outlaw
gene had to contend with a viable mechanism for looking after the common good.
The strategy should be expanded to end all too prevalent conflicts of interest
in and out of government and to prevent anyone from achieving economic power
that gives them the ability to buy government and design the economy for their
own purposes. People fear government power and ignore the ability of big money
to buy government. Taxes, rules against conflicts of interest, and universal
health care and education must create a more equitable balance of power
everywhere.
The great divide for some time, and growing, concerns
the nature of government. Should it be big or small and what should it do? At
the moment, that discussion takes place in the context of government debt but
the real issues turn on who pays taxes and who benefits from those taxes. The
small government tribe (the money tribe) wants to spread the taxes but not the
benefits. They want the enforcement of property rights and contracts, some
public safety, a big military to keep the oil and other resources coming and no
labor unions, social security or safety nets--government for the wealthy. Many
who are not wealthy buy into the money tribe's philosophy on the mistaken
assumption that a country this large in a world changing too fast can survive
without regulation or safety nets.
The money tribe really wants no interference with any
moneymaking scheme, be it speculative or ecologically unsound or that brings
down wages. If the money tribe has its way, money will gain complete control
and democracy will become a sham. We have almost reached that point now. The
money tribe appears ready to even sacrifice the economy, government budgets,
and all the other tribes to bring down government.
Without decent wages, social security, and other programs,
the economy will fail. Debts will not get paid. The money tribe has yet to
recognize the wisdom that one should be careful of getting what they want.
Cognitive dissonance may create mirages of a promised land where only a desert
awaits us. Hard times for some easily become hard times for all. Making our
neighbors pay for capitalism's failures is one way that happens.
See the author's book on this and related subjects. Natural Selection's Paradox: the Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and
the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud.
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